Harriet: News & Community

I thought I knew something about loss. Fireworks burst over the Salvadoran coast, blue, red and green, each pulse a heartbeat, a flower blooming then wilting, the spit and crackle...

One day before his 45th birthday, on April 1, 1984, the Prince of Soul, Prince of Motown, the iconic and widely beloved singer songwriter Marvin Gaye was assassinated by his father...

How to wash a heart: Remove it.                                –Bhanu Kapil   Then I felt his knocking  ]] inside my chest.      ...

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in a three-part essay. To read the first two installments visit these links: Part I and Part II. In the previous part of this essay, I...

I tumbled into poetry twice. Both times, dance and the dysfunctional body, mentioned in earlier posts, catalyzed the deep-dive. The first time was as a child and nascent reader; then...

So far, in this essay, I’ve been tracing the practice of “unreadability” in poetry of the 20th century, focusing especially on US lineages of concretism and Language poetry. Part I...

Editor's Note: This is the second installment in a three-part essay. To read the first installment visit this link: Part I. If alliteration in general is the presence of the same sounds...

Normally (if one may use the word “normally” for a Walter Mittyesque scenario), if one of my literary heroes were to reach out to me, for any reason, I reckon...

In the previous installment of this essay, I gave a brief intro to the unreadable in poetry and why we might learn to love it. I focused especially on unreadable poetry’s life...

It’s easy to get lost in debates around form and content, or form and function, or form and freedom, or form and fill-in-the-blank—arguments for the importance of one side over...